The Q Symphony

The Magic and the Mundane

This time next week will be Christmas Day, and the rain is beating down outside and hitting my window. It should be snow (a girl can dream). “There’s magic in the air,” sang Kermit as Bob Cratchit in “The Muppet Christmas Carol, and while there would undoubtedly be more if it could snow instead of rain, Christmas magic is indeed real; it’s a feeling in the air, an energy, just a vibe. There would definitely be more if I were in snowy NYC instead of the sodden West Midlands, but we live vicariously through the images on our screens. Magic is mentioned in the majority of Christmas films I rewatch every year, and magic is evoked by Dorothea Tanning’s The Truth About Comets (1945), Remedios Varo’s Allegory of Winter (1941), Elsa Schiaparelli’s advertisements as illustrated by Marcel Vertès, and Leonora Carrington’s gorgeously celestial The Q Symphony (2002).

One of Carrington’s later works—made during the last decade of her life—is a truly magical painting as animals from her psyche gather to listen to musicians playing what appears to be a nighttime concerto. Even the showy figures lurking in the back are joining in. The work fuses so many of Carrington’s influences—Celtic folklore, mysticism, mythology, animal transformation, spiritual deities and messengers, and the realm of the unexplainable. I read somewhere that it’s a fusion of the magic and the mundane, and while it’s never mundane with Carrington, isn’t that just the best explanation of life?

I wish you all a healthy, happy, rested Christmas and all the magic for the Holidays and going into 2026. Thank you for sticking around here to read these (often chaotically timed) dispatches, and for your lovely comments and enthusiasm. See you in the New Year x